Curated by Ziyad Hawwas – Lecture with VIOLA SHAFIK
THURSDAY, February 29th. 2024 – 7pm @B.L.O. Ateliers
Free Entrance
German-Egyptian filmmaker, curator and film scholar Viola Shafik presents her new book “Resistance, Dissidence, Revolution. Aesthetics of Documentary Film in the Middle East and North Africa.” Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the “rhizome,” the author takes a deterritorialized approach to revolutionary filmmaking that takes into account the diversity and fluidity of revolutionary works in the region, including the revolutionary potential and reach of historical and contemporary film collectives in Palestine, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Morocco.
Against the backdrop of his own involvement in the Egyptian film collective Mosireen, Egyptian artist and filmmaker Ziyad Hawwas will exchange views with the author on her perspective on collective revolutionary filmmaking. Short film excerpts will be shown.
About Viola Shafik
Viola Shafik is a filmmaker, curator and film scholar. She is the author of Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, 1998/2016 (AUC Press), Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation, 2007 (AUC Press), and editor of Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa, 2022 (AUC Press). She has taught at the American University in Cairo, the University of Zurich, Humboldt University, and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. She works as a curator and consultant for numerous international festivals and film funds, including La Biennale di Venezia, Berlinale, Dubai Film Market, Rawi Screen Writers Lab, Torino Film Lab and the World Cinema Fund. She has directed several documentaries, including The Lemon Tree/Shajarat al-laymun (1993), Planting of Girls/Mawsim zaraa al-banat (1999), Jannat `Ali-Ali in Paradise/My Name is not Ali (2011) and Arij – Scent of Revolution (2014). Currently in progress: Home Movie on Location.
